slammdunc23

I 100% agree that IFLS should be crediting the artists who make great work and direct traffic to IFLS's page. What I am having trouble understanding is why the general thrust of comments on this page seems to be "This is UNACCEPTABLE!!" when (and please correct me if I'm wrong) the general thrust of comments on pages about, e.g., The Pirate Bay seems to be "There's absolutely nothing wrong with The Pirate Bay!" Aren't both of these sites making money by hawking stolen wares? Why is The Pirate Bay so fiercely defended and IFLS so roundly condemned?

In my Portuguese class we were given this ambiguous phrase as a riddle:

"Maria toma banho porque sua mãe disse ela traga a toalha."

We had to make those words make sense only by adding punctuation and without changing the order of any words. Can you figure it out?

For those who don't speak Portuguese, the phrase above translates to: "Maria takes a bath because her mom said to her bring the towel." Doesn't make much sense!

The trick is that "sua," which means "her" when the following noun is feminine, is also the present third-person singular of the verb "suar," meaning "to sweat." Thus, with a few commas and quotation marks, it suddenly makes sense:

Maria toma banho porque sua. "Mãe," disse ela, "traga a toalha."

=

Maria takes a bath because she sweats. "Mom," she said, "bring the towel."

Not nearly as ambiguous as the "had had had had" example, but a similar lesson regarding the need for punctuation.

Edit: as personlurking pointed out, suar is "to sweat," not (as I put originally) "to smell." Thanks for catching that!

Sounds to me like they provide an API for "5-minute SIS Integration for Educational Applications" (from their home page) and that an SIS is an "information system [that] capture[s] and store[s] data on students — from class lists and attendance to grades" (from the TC article).

The creator of this website, rgarcia, specifically said (when he posted it a couple of days ago) that it was a 24-hour project: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3222253

Cut him some slack! I harbor many doubts re: your competence in the realm of friendliness.

Good point--I should have said that the Sikhs would go to the courts when the police chief (almost undoubtedly) said no. Still, the point is the same: under this author's conception of the issue, the courts /should/ come to the same conclusion about uniform color and badges being the only important parts of the police cap. The difference is that this decision should free /everyone/ to wear such hats, not just Sikhs or just the religious.

I said "in these cases"--turning down medicine and practicing that form of ritualized circumcision. Perhaps "often" is an overstatement, but there have been many cases of children dying when their Christian Scientist parents refused to get them proper medical attention (see, e.g., http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/unbound/flashbks/xsci/s...).

I think the turban example is perfectly consistent with what the author said. You ask "how would rules such as the uniform rule for the police ever evolve?" The answer is: in much the same way! Under this author's understanding of that example, the rule under scrutiny would be: "Every policeman must wear a uniform cap." The Sikhs, wishing to wear dastaars, would petition the chief of police to be able to wear a dastaar instead. The chief of police (or whoever), would then think to herself, "Well, is it all that important that our police officers wear matching CAPS, or is the important part merely that they wear headgear that matches the rest of the outfit and contains a badge?" She would then conclude that the more appropriate rule, which should apply to /everyone/, regardless of his religion, should be that every police officer must wear a hat of the appropriate color and that the hat must contain a badge. A Sikh could wear a dastaar; an atheist could wear a baseball cap or a turban--or a dastaar. The point is that /anyone/, not just a Sikh, can wear /any/ hat he chooses, so long as it meets those standards that /are/ considered too important to change, such as matching color and a badge.

I think another example might be more clear. Back in the 1990s, there was a big hullaballoo about Native Americans out West using peyote, a hallucinogenic, as part of a religious ceremony. Using peyote, however, was illegal in the state of Oregon, so a few members of the Native American Church were fired from their jobs and denied unemployment benefits after they were found using peyote. The Native Americans argued that they should be exempt from this law due to their religious beliefs, and many agreed. I don't, and neither did the Supreme Court (check out Employment Division v. Smith [1990]). And here's the reason: if peyote is "not that bad," i.e., if it's fine for /some/ people to use it (here, the Native Americans), then it should be fine for /all/ people to use it. If peyote is actually /too dangerous/, if it really /must/ be outlawed, then it should be outlawed for /everyone./ What someone believes about peyote should have no bearing on his right to use it. (This is the same reason we wouldn't allow ritualized murder of children even if someone claimed it was central to his religion--it's simply too dangerous!) It's /discrimination based on religion/ (or lack thereof) to say that Tom, who believes that peyote helps him communicate with a higher power, should be able to use peyote, but that Bob, who simply feels that using peyote helps him relax and to paint, should not. Why should Tom's belief be worth more than Bob's simply because a higher power is involved? And what kind of law should involve litigating someone's religious beliefs? Imagine: Q: "Isn't it true that you don't REALLY believe that peyote helps you commune with God?" A: "No, I swear I believe! I pray every day!" Q: "But I have a witness who says he saw you at Catholic mass last week! And here's a Bible we found in your house!" What a horrible mess that would be!

To get back to the dastaar example, then, all the author is saying is this: If a Sikh should be able to wear a dastaar, then an atheist should be able to wear a dastaar on the job, too. In fact, an atheist should be able to wear any hat of the proper color with a badge on it. His beliefs or lack thereof should have no bearing on his right to do something that everyone else can do.

The government certainly /can/ tell you "how to care for a member of your tribe" if that member is a minor. The ritual circumcision Hitchens references led to a small but deadly outbreak of herpes among recently circumcised babies. The government should let /adults/ practice their religion as they choose, but there would certainly be a rational basis for concluding that this particular practice unnecessarily endangers a third party: children who lack the ability to say, "No, thank you! I'm Buddhist." The same goes for Christian sects that disapprove of medicine. Sure, adults can turn down medical treatment for /themselves/, but if they do so for their children they could (and should) go to jail for child endangerment. A civil libertarian should want to protect everyone's right to liberty, the right to do whatever they wish /without harming others./ In these cases, the religious parents' choices often do harm their children, who are too young to object.

Agreed. Even ignoring the vitriol, the format makes this page very unpleasant to read.

I liked how Florida Citizens for Science did it: they held a contest in which entrants were encouraged to draw stick figure cartoons illustrating a misconception many people have about some aspect of science. Here's one of my favorites:

http://www.flascience.org/art/16x.jpg

I might be misunderstanding this complaint--

The way Finder is designed, you often can't simply drag some files from one location to another (e.g. moving to the subdirectory of another directory). You need two Finder windows open in order to accomplish this, whereas Windows Explorer, whose left pane has the directory structure and right pane has the contents of the currently selected directory, lets you do this effortlessly using only one window.

--but I think that it is possible to do this on a Mac by opening Finder, clicking to the file you want to move, and then making sure that the third of the four display modes available (it looks like three vertical bars) is chosen. (These icons are right of the forward/backward buttons on the left of a Finder window.) This changes the display to a directory mode and allows you to drag and drop files from any subfolder to any other. Hovering over a folder's name while dragging a file will open that folder in the rightmost column and allow you to move the file to any subfolder.

I always used to send hand-written thank-you notes, but when I started doing on-campus recruiting I realized that sometimes snail mail isn't feasible. The places I was interviewing were handing out second-round interviews the night of the interview or the next day, so if I wanted my message to reach my interviewer before s/he made a decision, I had to turn to email. Also, this is anecdotal, of course, but the only place I interviewed where I did not get an offer was the one I forgot to send thank-you emails to (I was traveling the whole day and then remembered too late...). Take that as you will! I personally think thank-you notes can only help you if they're well written and sincere.